Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

STOC and FOCS

As many of you already know, the accepted
papers for STOC '07 has
been posted. And in that great circle of theory life, the FOCS '07 Call for Papers is
out. Submission deadline is April 20 and FOCS will be held
October 21-23 in Providence.

One of my readers broke down the STOC accepts
by area.
Also check out the FAQ
sent with the paper comments, though I doubt
"No reviewer liked my paper. How come it was accepted?" gets
frequently asked.

For those authors of the 234 papers not accepted to STOC: Maybe your
tastes don't match those of this committee, maybe your paper is just
not STOC-worthy, or maybe life just isn't fair. In any case, don't get
angry, just go update your paper with the reviewer's comments and
submit your paper to a journal or another conference.

10 comments:

For those authors of the 234 papers not accepted to STOC: [...] maybe life just isn't fair. In any case, don't get angry, just go update your paper with the reviewer's comments and submit your paper to a journal or another conference.

Good advice. In this publishing papers business you better get used to rejection. The best thing to do is learn to channel it in a positive way: make the paper better, find another perhaps more appropriate venue and resubmit.

The number of STOC submissions (312) was unuusally high, probably in part because of being at FCRC but also because the deadline was a few weeks later than usual. Moreover, the tight FCRC constraints did not allow the PC to adjust the number accepted. This year's FOCS deadline is on a fairly normal schedule so there is less time between STOC and FOCS submission deadlines than usual.

All of this should mean that this time recycling rejected papers from STOC to FOCS submission should have a better chance of success than usual. Take heart.

On a different note, from my limited sample the comments from the reviewers were longer than usual. I do not know if this was by design, but it's a good step in the right direction. Here's hoping that future conferences continue to make an effort to provide more feedback to authors.

any suggestions for a (North American) conference where I can send a paper in the satisfiability / proof complexity domain that would have been a break-through paper had not a simultaneously released paper taken off a good bit of its lustre? CCC is a long ways off, and European venues are out due to budget constraints...